The Entrepreneurial Mindset

One way to get America back to great economic productivity is produce more tinkerers, more entrepreneurials, more people who can look at a problem and say “I can improve on that” or “I can fix that.” Government cannot do this. Only parents can encourage their children to be little capitalists. Or if you wish little entrepreneurials.

What is an entrepreneurial mindset? Well, according to a Success.com article some the characteristics of an entrepreneurial are:

• a self-promoter- this sounds egotistical but in a way when you run a business you are the business so you have to get the word out about your business.
• self-confident
• a self-starter
• a good planner and organizer
• competitive
• optimistic because your business will have setbacks once in a while.
• passionate about your product or service- if you are not why should your customers be passionate about your product?
• patient
• decisive

These are the type of characteristics parents can encourage in their children. Some other entrepreneurial traits that are mostly inborn are:

• handling pressure
• being comfortable with risk
• a strong drive to succeed
• encouraged by setbacks/challenges
• handling criticism well
• desire to work hard

One other thing. If you agree to any these statements:

• Your workday must include a chunk of "me" time.
• You spend time personalizing your office.
• You don't empty your own trash, even when you're headed that way.
• You feel you could be a lot more productive if you just had that new...
• You're still mad your department got shorted during the last budget cycle.
• You discuss work-life balance issues with passion and intelligence.
• You've ever said, even once, "I've paid my dues."

Then you’re probably not entrepreneurial material. Possibly a politician or a bureaucrat. Notice all the statements is about you sacrificing yourself to the business. It’s not about you so much but about the job. Making it a success.

One other thing parents can teach a little entrepreneurial is that making a profit is not a sin. Another word for profit is incentive.

Miscellaneous Thoughts Part 31

• You'll never see a midget (sorry, I mean a little person) play the tuba. Think about it. This is probably why you will never see a little people polka band.
• Humor: In order to get the best video of a tornado approaching your home stand in front of an open window. Pull back any curtains so they won't block the view of the camcorder.
• To NDErs real life is virtual life. The afterlife is more vibrant more real.
• Sometimes the monkey throws poo at you and sometimes at your nemesis.
• I think Michelle Malkin should run against Hillary Clinton (if she is the nominee) for POTUS. Mrs. Malkin would not pull any punches. Not sure about the VP candidate for Michelle. Possibly, Glenn Beck?
• I believe that the Mothman is some kind of daemon because it has red eyes and supernatural abilities (it’s been reported around the world). Colin Wilson in his book Mysteries believed Big Foot and the Loch Ness monster are daemons too.
• Obama’s new slogan: No pain for the country, no gain for me.
• Obamacare: Welcome to the New Slavery.
• I wonder if you can be a conscious objector to Obamacare?
• What Obama was thinking: If you like the Constitution, you can keep the Constitution. Or was that your freedom? I get confused.

Four Problem Categories for Conservatives

These four problems are taken from Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953):

1. The problem of spiritual and moral regeneration; the restoration of the ethical system and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. Spiritual restoration cannot be a means to social restoration; it must be its own end.
2. The problem of leadership, which has two aspects: the preservation of some measure of veneration, discipline, order, and class; and the purgation of our system of education, so that learning once again may become truly liberal.*
3. The problem of the proletariat. The mass of men must find status and hope within society; true family, respect for the past, responsibility for the future, private property, duty as well as right, inner resources that matter more than the mass-amusements and mass-vices with the which the modern proletarian seeks to forget his lack of an object.
4. The problem of economic stability. This does not mean the security of plenty for everyone: no social program, least of all the planned economy of the welfare state, is likely to succeed in gratifying the material appetites of all humanity. But it does mean the establishment of a rational relationship between endeavor and reward. It means the adjustment of the American economy to the real capacities of American production, which cannot permanently supply the demands of half the world with a flow of manufactures and agricultural commodities.

Even though these problems were written in the 1950s they are still valid today because they transcend time. People at the core level are the same throughout history. Kirk was saying these are problems with the human condition that conservatives have to face and try to solve or moderate as he put it.

 

*He means classical liberal as in libertarian.

Slavery: The Opposite of Free Enterprise

Even slaves with relatively humane masters lacked the freedoms that most of today’s Americans, living under the modern leviathan, take for granted.

Peter Kolchin, in his seminal American Slavery: 1619–1877, sums up the reality:

Slaves could hardly turn around without being told what to do. They lived by rules, sometimes carefully constructed and formally spelled out and sometimes haphazardly conceived and erratically imposed. Rules told them when to rise in the morning, when to go to the fields, when to break for meals, how long and how much to work, and when to go to bed; rules also dictated a broad range of activities that were forbidden without special permission, from leaving home to getting married; and rules allowed or did not allow a host of privileges, including the right to raise vegetables on garden plots, trade for small luxuries, hunt, and visit neighbors. Of course, all societies impose rules on their inhabitants in the form of laws, but the rules that bound slaves were unusually detailed, covered matters normally untouched by law, and were arbitrarily imposed and enforced, not by an abstract entity that (at least in theory) represented their interests, but by their owners. Slaves lived with their government.

I thank God I don’t live with my government! For many years the pro-market tradition saw slavery as a grave violation of its principles. Kolchin writes:

Early political economists—including Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations (1776) remained for decades the most influential justification for the principles underlying capitalism—believed that slavery, by preventing the free buying and selling of labor power and by eliminating the possibility of self-improvement that was the main incentive to productive labor, violated central economic laws.

Although critics blame market exchange for the rise of slavery, this criticism is grossly unfair. The slave trade was indeed a market of sorts—unfree, unjust, and regulated—but the most fundamental relationship in slavery was not a market at all. Kolchin explains:

Slave owners engaged in extensive commercial relations, selling cotton (and other agricultural products), buying items both for personal consumption and for use in their farming operations, borrowing money, and speculating in land and slaves, but the market was conspicuously absent in regulating relations between the masters and their slaves. In other words, relations of exchange were market-dominated, but relations of production were not.

The slave power dominated political life in the South and enjoyed federal support through the Fugitive Slave Clause. Slavery was a major government program, its enforcement costs socialized through law. “The chief way that the South’s slaveholding elite externalized the costs of the peculiar institution was slave patrols,” writes Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. These slave patrols were “established in every slave state” to enforce black codes, inflict punishment, and suppress insurrections and were “compulsory for most able bodied white males.” Slave patrols, necessary to slavery’s maintenance, were a flagrant violation of the free economy. [read more]

It sounds like slaves were owned by progressive masters.

Ayatollah Khomeini's Four Basic Techniques

Here are the four basic techniques that Khomeini consolidated his domestic power after the overthrow of the Shaw:

1. The constant mobilization of the masses. The mobilization exploited the symbols and doctrines of Islamic fundamentalism, and the techniques of twentieth-century movements, from monster rallies, constant incitement of hatred to the revolution’s “satanic” enemies and once Saddam Hussein attacked and the bloody Iran-Iraq war began, constant reference to martyrdom.  
2. The regime devoted constant attention to the needs to the most impoverished sectors of society. Money, food, and housing were seized from the old elites and redistributed to the very poor. Even the poor was exempted from paying taxes and provided free transportation. This ensured the loyalty of the lower classes and kept the well-to-do constantly concerned about their own well-being.
3. Total, uncompromising war against anything having to do with the West. Khomeini banned music. Western books were removed from the schools and often burned. Strict segregation of the sexes was imposed throughout the educational system. Polygamy was reinstituted.
4. Use of the judicial system as an instrument of terror. In the first seven months of Khomeini’s rule, the revolutionary tribunals killed off more than six hundred people, including many who had welded great power under the old regime. 

Source: Iranian Time Bomb. The Mullah Zealots ' Quest for Destruction (2007) by Michael A. Ledeen.

The first three techniques are probably still used in Iran. Probably the fourth one too especially if you criticize the current leader or Islam or the Quran. The satanic enemies of Iran are of course America, Israel and our allies. Mainly America and Israel. That hasn’t changed even after the Iran-Iraq war is over.  Being nice to Iran’s leadership won’t change how they think or feel about America or Israel.  Western ideas are probably still banned in Iran.

Conservative Parents, Left-Wing Children

An interesting article by Dennis Prager:

There is a phenomenon that is rarely commented on but which is as common as it is significant.

For at least two generations, countless conservative parents have seen their adult children reject their core values.

I have met these parents throughout America. I have spoken with them in person and on my radio show. Many have confided to me -- usually with a resigned sadness -- that one or more of their children has adopted left-wing social, moral and political beliefs.

A particularly dramatic recent example was a pastor who told me that he has three sons, all of whom have earned doctorates -- from Stanford, Oxford and Fordham. What parent wouldn't be proud of such achievements by his or her children?

But the tone of his voice suggested more irony than pride. They are all leftists, he added wistfully.

"How do you get along?" I asked.

"We still talk," he responded.

Needless to say, I was glad to hear that. But as the father of two sons, I readily admit that if they became leftists, while I would, of course, always love them, I would be deeply saddened. Parents, on the left or the right, religious or secular, want to pass on their core values to their children. [read more]

A new plan for the Grand Old Party

From Joe for America.com:

In light of the 2013 election with Chris Christie getting elected and Ken Cuccinelli getting defeated, the Republican Party establishment will look at the results and think that in 2014 and 2016 that they need to go moderate; and they will be wrong. There are several problems with the Republican Party and they need to be addressed if the party is going to be viable and effective.

   •    The Party needs to decide who and what they are.

Are they conservative? Are they moderate? Are they ideologically pure or is there a big tent mindset? As someone who is an aspiring campaign manager and has studied politics most of her life, I have a solution. I think that the Republican Party needs to be primarily conservative with moderate elements but those moderate elements MUST understand that they are in the minority in this party and that they can’t tell the majority what to do. The party needs to be conservative to provide voters a clear choice. I often hear people say “There’s no difference between the parties.” Any more that’s true when speaking of the GOP establishment and the Democrat Party; but contrast the Tea Party with the Democrats and you get a stark contrast. GOP history should be a lesson that when we run conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and how George W. Bush was sold to us, then we win. But when we run moderates like Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney we lose. So the GOP establishment needs to stop dead their headlong rush to embrace the Christie 2016 Presidential campaign NOW. The GOP needs to be looking around for articulate, charismatic conservatives who are women and minorities to break the stereotypical old, white guy candidate. Sen. Ted Cruz would be an excellent choice as would Gov. Bobby Jindal and Gov. Susannah Martinez. Until and unless the party decides that it’s conservative with moderate elements then the party will continue to struggle and be ineffective because it will continue to be at odds with itself. [read more]

A good detailed plan. The rest of the points are:

• The GOP establishment needs to recognize that they are not listening to their base and are no longer connected with it.
• The Party needs a 21st Century version of The Contract with America.
• The Party needs to package the message to make it easy to understand, personal and yet in line with the principles of the Party.